


i. jhāna

by Anusaya



Series: kāmaguṇa [1]
Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-18
Updated: 2011-10-18
Packaged: 2017-10-24 18:14:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/266418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anusaya/pseuds/Anusaya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A sort of fairytale, and the one who taught you to re-write them.</p><p>WARNING FOR REALLY VAGUE IMPLIED SEX OR SOMETHING, I GUESS...</p>
            </blockquote>





	i. jhāna

It is a joke.

At least, Mukuro would say so. And the joke is: the world. All of it. The world order. Capitalism, consumerism, imperialism. Every chain store masking a labour farm: designer shoes out of sweatshops. The pretty feet walking in them. The minds of the the citizens of every nation, with their back-patting, the self-assurances paid to their consciences; the insistent need to confirm one's self as a decent human being while profiting ignorantly, contentedly from human suffering.

That's right.

But that's getting ahead, isn't it?

For the first thirteen years of her life, Nagi -- along with her mother and step-father (the father had been removed before birth, a break-up marinated in aggravation, not to be spoken of) -- inhabits a box-like house of many rooms which is sometimes replete with shadows and sometimes beautiful with noon light, whose open-windowed breath is occasionally punctuated by the notes of her mother's piano, but mostly so silent as herself.

And maybe it is the house which gives Nagi the silence, as she tip-toes up and down the winding staircase which yawns its way up three stories.

No cats. Mother is allergic. No dogs. Barking is too distracting. Step-dad has work to do.

Nagi has no friends. She has bony knees which bruise often and knobbed elbows and skinny legs and high socks which, on occasion, drop around her ankles. Her lower lip is persistently bitten down, as if her teeth have begun a crusade to force its subjugation, and this pattern follows across her body, which always, in some respect, tries to insist upon its subservience to itself -- from the inward pinch of the shoulder blades to the crossed arms and fingers threading fitfully together.

Down the street, there's an empty lot where a garden can still be dredged out from beneath the weeds, and Nagi likes to visit it up until the day when it's torn down and cemented over to make room for industrialization.

It's not long after this that she's run over.

In even the best circumstances, traumatic incidents have a way of tearing at the edges of family structures. But these are hardly the best circumstances. Undesired child, distracted parents. She is the source of the commotion, so far as they are concerned.

 _Then_ Nagi has the audacity to hitch-hike her way onto a miraculous survival.

This becomes awkward for everyone, given her mother's willingness to blurt out how much she preferred a quieter alternative, and given that Nagi is now acutely aware of the degree to which her caretakers really do wish she would stop being another mouth to feed.

And there is a period of time for which Chrome -- because she is Chrome now -- puzzles over her relationship with her mother in a daze not so unlike what one experiences when one has just been struck in the head by a misfired ball.

Maybe, she thinks fleetingly, her mother did not really mean those things she overheard her saying. Maybe it was just nerves. _Nerves._

But she already knows that persuading herself of this is a lost cause. Thirteen years and her body wears the insignia of a loveless life: isolation from humanity writ large in every tremble, hunch, and stutter.

So, following her accident and subsequent "rescue," Chrome rarely visits that house. Rarely climbs to her room on the third floor. Does not expect dinner on the days when she drops by to seek out more of her belongings. Her mother and step-father give her leave to enter, but the uneasiness never departs. She knows she is unwanted in this place. There can be no return.

She goes there, on off days, mostly to sleep or to search for her lotion bottles for when she visits the public showers.

She packs a suitcase of clothing and stuffed toys and bedding supplies.

Walks out the door.

Is never asked where she goes.

Never explains.

~*~

Newly-minted teenager Dokuro Chrome has yet to encounter anything in this world which she is incapable of accepting. She accepted lovelessness. Opened her arms to death. Welcomed into her ear the lilting, laughing silken voice.

She patches her missing eye, slices her hair. Drags her bulging suitcase to Kokuyo's misnamed "healthy land," with the broken windows and overgrown moss.

A wide jungle of ruination. Snakes in the yard and mice in the corners. Two boys, homeless like her, but utterly unlike her. A domesticated mouse, herself, with a wild cur and a strange sullen youth who drags blunt fingers along yo-yo tanglings.

These boys don't like Chrome, don't want her around, and tolerate her with the kind of hands-in-pockets shuffling and distracted, absent, no eye contact staring best reserved for undesired party guests.

Chrome finds that she does not mind them.

There is something comforting about the sheer wretchedness of their location, their lives. Her big wide house is gone. She eats with her fingers rather than with neatly arranged cutlery. Where she once slept in a four-poster bed with hanging curtains, her small body now collapses each night on a dingy couch.

But those voluminous spaces, those pristine silver pieces and satin sheets, had seemed after all little more than gaping monuments against her own condition. Stark opposition, distorted mirrors by which her loneliness had been magnified.

Here, it's wet and grimy. There's no pretense, no suggestion that any aspect of her surrounding is superior to its actuality. Chrome can raid Ken's chip bags any time she pleases. Can scoop dirty coins -- spoils from one of their petty store thefts -- and run to the arcade. Rent a movie and bunch herself on the couch to watch, draped by a tattered blanket. She can visit the park. The sushi shops.

Summer afternoons, Chrome walks by the cinema houses, lunch pail in hand, and sees the pretty girls in their breezy dresses, fleurettes in curled, pigtailed locks, dust of 3:00pm light on necklaces, skin dappled with the fall of tree petals. The boys from the neighbouring school approach. Mingle. Conversation, teases, half-hearted protests from glossed lips. First brushes of fingertips.

Chrome, now disfigured, looks on.

~*~

She learns to weave castles and remember memories that are not hers.

The weight of her single eye: a swell, a purple bruise where the blood jackhammers the surface as the panorama slides over her vision and through her mind. Whether she is resting on whatever passes for her bed at the moment or taking her breakfast, the imagery strikes her in profusion.

Pendicel of a flower; floral axis, a whorl of sepals and petals, calyx and corolla, rippling heart's blood red or the colour of Chrome's own hair. Shifting to each hue in between. Rain droplet sliding over the base of the stamen. Like a tear.

Chrome blinks.

Pink. White. Lotus.

Chrome blinks.

The sky opens. Red, smoggy with black. Cancerous, noxious, a chaotic miasma.

The ground drops from beneath her, and she is falling into that wilted sky. Tendrils, extensions of some deep water beast that has fused with reality itself, envelop her: wrap her arms, her sinking abdomen, her legs. Thrust down her throat and into the pit of her eye socket. Squirming red, leech-like.

No sound when she opens her mouth to scream. No pain to accompany the raw hoarseness of her throat. Fingers scrabbling at her hair. _Make it stop. Make it stop!_

 _You are always so impressionable,_ Mukuro in-her-mind says.

 _I can't take this! I'll die._

 _No one_ , he says, _insists that you must._

Her head jerks back. Up her spine and into her neck: coil of blue light, phosphorous-like. White. Chrome is not certain if what she witnesses is real or imagined.

But when she closes her eye. _Breathes --_

All is absolute stillness. She strikes the ground.

The lace-white of her dress, warm-wet as if drenched in a bath, clinging to her body; Chrome shivers and sees the image of herself on the hospital bed, Mukuro leaning over her, a scalpel of purple flame rising from his fingers, hard against his palm. Another finger to his lips. A motion for silence. Re-assurance.

Watching with one eye as he pulls the cloth from her stomach. As the pitted concave rises with glistening red striations. Ghost of a touch over her small fingers; the oxygen mask still covering her mouth as Chrome's gaze drags downwards, beyond the opening where she is the sum of her parts. Drags downwards, hoping to see. Proof of.

 _Resilience,_ he tells her now.

Chrome is hunched on the ground, hair long again. Whole. Everywhere and nowhere.

~*~

 _To take on a student --_

Student, he calls her. Resilience. Resistance.

Tsk, Chrome, do not let yourself be overwhelmed by the realm of endless nightmares. Ride the chaos. My Chrome. You have an upcoming battle, you understand.

Our contract. Which you must honour. You did agree, and it really is simple. And there is nothing to worry about, for I will see you through. All six hells, but –

Opening your mind to the other worlds which slither throughout this one, unseen by most.

Chrome is thirteen.

Burnt to death. Crushed. Strangled. Cast into poisons. And she has come out whole. Wobbly, delirious. Drowning kitten saved at the last moment. But whole. Breathing.

Her single eye is steady. Watching the deadly, cloudless blue eternity of a sky. The water of their world together.

Shifts to an alpine landscape.

All is the smell of wood and loam and air. Resin bleeding from illusionary trees. The pretense of wind against her shoulders.

~*~

Chrome turns.

A stroke of fingers through her hair.

"Mukuro-sama."

His eyes, watching her as if in expectation, relax. Soften at the edges.

At her movements, his hands automatically re-positioned themselves. The touch: a reward? Consolation? But Chrome is not used to being touched.

Distracting. Not a negative, annoying variety of distraction. The motions of his hand over her warm skull, cupping -- trailing through a fictitious length of purple which no longer matches her true body.

But she feels it, all the same. Distracting. Such as when you are walking through a path amongst the honeysuckle, and a hummingbird alights. Distracting like butterflies, the rise of fizz over summer soda. Like the girls and boys at the cinema houses, or the drift of sakura petals.

Her little mouth opens. Hangs that way.

"I believe we are done for today," Mukuro says. He does not sound displeased. The smile is still accounted for. "You did very well, my -- "

It startles him, briefly. That she has reached out and touched, lightly -- clumsily -- at his ear. At the hair around it. A mishandled attempt to reciprocate.

Thoughtless.

Instinctive on her end. Cat with a ball of yarn.

Though Chrome has never been presented with such an opportunity.

"Oya?" He laughs. A purr: "Is that what you wish for?"

"I don't -- I want -- "

She jerks away, as if burned.

Sweep of Mukuro's hand, and Chrome's hair is short again, as it is in reality. A boy's cut.

She has grown to think of herself, perhaps, as neuter. Chest flat beneath the cut of her school uniform. Hair short. A body undesired and, thus far, undesiring. Not the kind of body which lusts or which inspires lust. That word means nothing to her.

Mukuro fingers the crest which mimics his own style. "You changed it."

"Y-yes," she answers.

He looks curious. Fascinated. With Mukuro kneeling, bent over Chrome, and Chrome leaning backwards, they are almost on level. Her eye follows the line of his chest. Their structures are not dissimilar.

He is lean, as is she; firm angles and the suggestion of a slender bone structure. Pale skin tucked beneath lighter cotton. His hair, which catches the light in bizarre zig-zags, which gleams with it. Mukuro is, Chrome realizes, barely less youthful than she. Fifteen or sixteen.

 _I don't know what I want,_ she would say, if she could piece the syllables together adequately enough, but she cannot, and never could, so rather, she bites her bottom lip. Stares, as if waiting to be told what to think.

Mukuro lets her down, gently.

The forests and hills and ocean and the sun itself dissipate, and Chrome is left lying in shadow upon the couch.

~*~

Rokudo Mukuro is, to Dokuro Kuromu, an anomaly. Similar in nature to the textbook reading of a neutron star, a black hole, or a supernova. Defiant of physics. Without beginning or end; _in media res._ Light from a distant section of the galaxy, filtered to her human eye. Timeless.

He sprang into her life, into her mind, fully formed, and so Chrome imagines he entered this world. Because his body does not stop at the tips of his fingers, the line of his brow, but flows on into her, breathes out through her lungs, and creates around her, around them, an ever-shifting panorama of locations.

A world where the sun is never hot, and pretty girls never walk with their boyfriends and talk amongst one another.

A world without classes or readings or homework or violence or parents who don't love you.

He, she, suspended in the aether of the illusion Mukuro forges. Empty. Sterile. But not artificial. Pristine, like glacier water. Like something very honest which has boiled up from the oldest places on Earth.

 _It's real, isn't it?_ she asks.

 _Yes, of course,_ he says. _Illusions originate from within your thoughts._

And what comes from within you is, in any respect, that which allows the truth in this world.

 _I wonder, Chrome. Is the sky blue --_ Chrome feels (his) her finger tap (his) her chin in mock thought, as a smile stretches her lips. _Or is this merely a perception of our eyes? Or, in your case, I suppose I should say --_

Eye.

Automatic.

 _Yes._ She feels him shift. Ripple over pond water through the fabric of her skin.

Then, dismissal, and he continues, as if unbroken:

 _A human being's sensory systems grant them the only basis for what they may determine as 'reality.' Say_ \-- A slight laugh. _\-- the sweetness of chocolate, to your taste buds, or the smell of cut oranges –_

And now he is talking expansively, shrugging theatrically and waving his hand.

 _The sound of crying,_ he continues, and the smile grows more sinister on (her) his lips. _Or even the feel of._

And Chrome, all the while, listens. Hangs with bated breath to the words, and by now, she cannot discern whether they originate from within her own mouth, or his, and whether the heaviness she feels on her lips, on her tongue, as his syllables roll forth, is also of her imagination's own making. Mukuro's and Chrome's bodies are, like this, acrylic paint swirling together.

Truth in a fabricated existence.

 _Well, I suppose there is much you can feel._

And this time, Mukuro's laughter is distant with contemplation.

"Like hurt?"

Place your index finger before your eye: let your gaze relax, unfocused, staring beyond your digit. Ten seconds of this.

Now: Focus.

Their exact moment of bodily twinning and untwinning feels like what you just witnessed.

In another instant, Chrome's eye watches Mukuro, sitting by the lake of his mind's own invention. The bench looks as if it has never _not_ been beneath him, and the ducks (as with all of Mukuro's creations) are born in the middle of their lives, already caught in a picture-perfect moment of nipping at the bread crumbs which his fingers dispense.

"Yes, I suppose so." His voice is husky. As if.

Chrome tilts her head a moment. Wonders what he is not saying. And, as though suspecting, Mukuro laughs again, rich-throated, and lifts his chin, high and proud: "But hurt flows both ways, my cute Chrome. That is one lesson you are still learning."

She has no retort.

 _But you will master this, someday,_ he whispers, inside her mind. _You will. You will._

~*~

She has never categorized him because he is not a thing meant to be explained.

He is that which _is,_ which filled and re-shaped Nagi, inspiring her to re-shape herself.

So Chrome might deem him her sensei, but she does not. And she might say that he is her savior, but this word, too, goes unused between them.

Her mind, which now unfurls columns of flames, and her hands, which have taken hold of her hair and severed it -- which burn with blisters from the handle of their trident -- his, hers -- these parts of her have, in half-conscious moments, begun to twitch with unformed interest, newness, alive but not yet embodied.

~*~

There had always been scant privacy between the two of them. Their situation did not permit it. Even so, the order of events is mistaken.

First comes December, when her hands are his hands, and her hands roam over her own contours, and the flare in them, in her, grows stronger, and she recognizes, somehow, that she is attempting to slake it, even as it intensifies.

A week later, he (the illusion of himself) kisses her.

It occurs as she is walking out the back door of a tea shop, having purchased a few packets for herself and the boys, should they be so inclined, and the day -- and the gesture itself -- are both so ordinary, so banal as to be unmemorable, except that Chrome, until the moment after she has been kissed, had never believed she would be, and now she _has been._

What had it felt like? It had been over so fast, she could not say. Mukuro is gone within a blink, but the echo of his presence lingers like another set of footsteps at her side, and Chrome hears the chime of his laughter.

And she cannot remember the initial press of his lips, and there are no magical notes of music accompanying the fleeting motion, but Chrome knows, suddenly and wholly, that whatever she has been feeling will not be burnt out of her with her touches, and it is all new and strange and warm, to be so alert to one's self, and one's skin, and to be thinking in this manner, so much that she cannot think of tea, and is distracted during the entire walk home.

~*~

It is after many more kisses that Chrome begins to have such worries as whether her legs are smooth enough or sufficiently shaved and whether her spine protrudes too much, but her hesitations do not halt her.

On the couch at Kokuyo, it is quiet, save for the start-stop patter of rain which has begun outside.

Because she cannot meet his gaze, she watches the door and the fall of the rain and the thirsty shivering of the winter birds, and she presses her ear to his temple and tastes his hair and listens for the sounds of his breath as it ebbs and flows, an ocean of different rhythms -- slow, quickened, slow again -- to strengthen Chrome with distraction until such time as it is over.

(The next day, it would hurt to sit down. Until she swore that _never again would she --_

Which lasted two more days.)

"What did you -- why did you do that?" she asks, afterwards, while collecting her boots from the floor and hugging them to her chest. A conscious selection, those: the skull designs had matched the name he had given her, and the look had, she thought at the time, added to her image. To her new life.

"Because I desired to," Mukuro answers. In the rain shadows, mosaic of his eyes; blood clot red, the velvet curtains of opera houses in one eye, sky and denim and ocean in the other. "Should I not have done so?"

Teasing, as he is wont to do.

Chrome shakes her head. "No, it's not that."

He waves her to him. Grips her shoulders and pulls her from her attempted kneel when she resumes her position on the couch.

"You know if you apply too much pressure to your legs, they will fall asleep."

"Oh."

And she must smile, shakily. Mukuro's expression is almost pensive as he brushes stray strands of her hair behind one ear.

His mouth to her mouth, neck, shoulders, the ridge of bone at her sternum: bite-blooms; eye half-lidded, and Chrome acutely feels the absence of the other -- the one place on her body which, even during this, she masks from his gaze, from its mixed, mingling, roiling intensity, and Chrome is a long pale garden, sinew and nubs and knobs and a mussed bob.

It must be like kissing a boy, but for the skirt, and the smallness of her voice.

Simple and honest and clean, even in a dirty house, on a dirty couch; even with the shifting temperatures and the marks which Chrome's skin too readily acquires, and the saliva-sticking-dirt on her knees. The clothing strewn everywhere, or not fully removed from their bodies in the event of haste, her fading self-consciousness about the size of her breasts, although there is not sufficient flesh to cup. The place beneath her ear, the tangle of her hair; his bemusing face, and she wants, she realizes, to nip at his ankle bone, at his calves. At unthinkably mundane places which are only less so for being a part of him.

Because it -- nothing -- is real.

Mukuro incarnates himself as he sees fit, projects himself into reality to his own liking, and Chrome re-incarnates him once again with her mind, her lips and eye.

 _A human being's sensory systems grant them the only basis for what they may determine as 'reality.'_

His words. Remembered now.

I understand. I understand.

Sea shell ocean wave echo of her voice, her rebuttal, and rain on the shingles outside.

**Author's Note:**

> OLD, written last year. Published 12-05-2010 on an RP I once played at. It was originally written as a memory-dream, so its functionality as a story is dubious, but oh well. And because it was written for that, I feel it's weirdly insular (WHERE IS EVERYONE ELSE, CHROME). But there is more, and there are later parts, and I think those work a bit better. \o_O/ fffuuuu


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